COMMENT
COMMENT NATO's overdue crisis If Europe and the world are to be spared another round of deadly escalation of the nuclear arms race, it may well depend on the support that can be mustered in the...
...Even in Russia While the nuclear industries of the United States and other nations were reeling last spring from the effects of the Three Mile Island disaster, the president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences announced pointedly that his country would forge ahead with its nuclear power program...
...Europeans should note with care that the withdrawal of Soviet troops and tanks and the offer of a reduced Soviet nuclear arsenal are the cause of the current crisis in NATO...
...How many people must be buried before the nation discovers what Agent Orange really does to the human organism...
...On the contrary: Parties vied in evading the key issue of atomic power, and the dramatic moments were, if anything, those of low comedy as the lead swung back and forth throughout election night between the non-socialist bloc that had won the 1976 election and the Social Democratic-led opposition...
...Parliamentary debates in Holland do not ordinarily attract much attention outside that small western European country, a junior partner in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization...
...The Labor Department reports that hourly earnings have been increasing at 7.8 per cent over the last year — barely half the current double-digit rate of inflation...
...The opposition of the Government's chief intelligence officer "initially caused a mood of doom and gloom among MX advocates," Air Force Magazine reports...
...NAS would zero in on the fate of the 1,200 men of "Operation Ranch Hand...
...Since its earliest days the alliance has served not to deter the Russians, who have been busy enough with problems of their own in central and eastern Europe, but to justify the presence, in congenial quarters, of a vast American overseas military establishment...
...The only firm evidence to date is that the demonstrators succeeded in embarrassing the U.S...
...The founding of the Carolina Brown Lung Association in 1975 changed all that...
...Chancellor Helmut Schmidt is an enthusiastic supporter of the NATO build-up, including the new nuclear weapons...
...It is less surprising that it took Swedish politicians a full month to produce a government — a modern record — than that one could be produced at all...
...Since the earliest days of the Cold War there had always been the ultimate deterrent of strategic nuclear weapons capable of being hurled against Soviet targets by U.S.-based bombers and submarines in the event of a Soviet attack in Europe or elsewhere...
...To some extent, they were victims of the success of their own policies in the hands of their opponents...
...William Steif (William Steif is a Washington correspondent for the Scripps-Howard newspapers...
...by 1980 it is scheduled to supply 10 per cent of the electricity generated in the western part of that country — one of the highest ratios in the world...
...In the name of peace and security, the arms trade with the Third World has increased more than 400 per cent since 1960, but the trade has brought neither peace nor security to those countries...
...Naturally, the business community welcomes this approach...
...Some deterrent...
...The number of defendants was reduced from seventy-eight to seventeen, but most of the defendants could not be linked to specific acts...
...But the fact that their reservations have been heard at all is notable in itself...
...If that is the threat we face, let there be more of them...
...The police arrested seventy-eight of the demonstrators on charges of disorderly conduct — a misdemeanor...
...The prosecutor said he believed in the death penalty "as a deterrent...
...We shipped as many weapons as all other nations combined...
...The committee's assignment is "fact-finding and advisory," and it is supposed to complete a report within twenty-four months...
...But the workers were kept in the dark...
...The causes of brown lung disease have been well understood for decades, but it was not until recent years that American textile firms stopped concealing its existence among their workers...
...None of the winners — the Moderates, up eighteen seats to seventy-three...
...A $33 billion secret The October issue of A ir Force Magazine provides a brief but fascinating account of a deep division within President Carter's National Security Council (NSC) over the latest drastic escalation of the arms race, the $33 billion MX missile...
...as U.S...
...They ought to have a strict timetable and work at the job full-time...
...About ten years ago the United States began deploying nuclear missiles that can hit Soviet targets from western Europe...
...missiles now at issue...
...The other eighteen, he says, were "coincidental...
...Most directly exposed were the 1,200 men who conducted the Air Force's "Operation Ranch Hand," the spraying program...
...The Heinz-Bonior bill also would make children of Vietnam veterans who showed Agent Orange-related symptoms eligible for VA compensation...
...Some suicide...
...Corporate prices are also affected in large measure by raw material costs...
...Sweden marks time The verdict of Swedish voters on their first non-socialist government in almost half a century had been awaited with some suspense...
...veterans who served in Vietnam eligible for VA compensation for disabilities stemming from exposure to Agent Orange, whose ingredients include highly toxic dioxins...
...He estimates there would be "at least 600,000 claims...
...The unions and central figures in the party leadership are convinced supporters of atomic power, while many younger activists are fervent opponents...
...The VA convened a largely non-scientific "steering committee" after the Agent Orange furor began in 1978, and hoped the problem would go away...
...Three cheers lor recession Seldom have the politicians and economic pundits been so united on economic policy as in their acceptance of the Federal Reserve Board's current credit-tightening measures...
...What is perhaps most striking in the election outcome is the inability of the Social Democrats to capitalize on the disunity of the non-socialist parties...
...John Logue (John Logue teaches political science at Kent State University and writes frequently on Scandinavian affairs...
...I fully believe this is not a bluff and that the Germans are firm on this...
...The puncturing of such myths is a specialty of Ruth Sivard, whose new survey, World Military and Social Expenditures 19 79, the latest in a series, has just been published by The Institute for World Order and the Arms Control Association...
...Even after 1970, when Burlington began a medical surveillance program of its own, these workers were not given the results of their pulmonary function tests and were allowed to continue working after they had developed symptoms...
...Aleksandrov remarked a few years ago that "the normal operation of atomic stations presents no risk whatsoever...
...The Agent Orange scandal Some members of Congress are beginning to take Agent Orange seriously...
...Yuri Koryakin, an economist, in the current issue of Kommunist, the influential theoretical journal of the Soviet Communist Party...
...He had been executed by the state of Nevada, by the people of Nevada, by all of us...
...Never was a crisis more welcome...
...Because Bishop seemed eager to die, two justices of the U.S...
...A third of the 676 who claimed Agent Orange disabilities said they suffered skin conditions ranging from chloracne to alopecia and eczema...
...he simply felt the MX would not work...
...The perpetuation of America's global presence, much of it centered in Europe, might have been a tolerable burden in an earlier time, as it was for the British and French, the Spanish and Portuguese, in their days of empire...
...Some 10.65 million gallons of undiluted Agent Orange are known to have been sprayed on Vietnam between 1963 and 1971...
...Military expenditures have increased the income gap between the poor and the wealthy nations and exacerbated income divisions within the poorer states...
...and the Communists, up three to twenty — was in a position to form a government...
...The association is convinced that the only way to improve occupational health and safety is, as one staff member put it, "for workers to organize and get on top of it themselves...
...The mindless military nuclearization of Europe is part of that obsolescence...
...Economic correspondents for The New York Times and National Public Radio have defended the Federal Reserve Board and the Administration in much the same terms...
...But if recessions don't control inflation effectively, they do discourage workers from seeking large pay increases...
...But it also paralyzed Swedish energy policy, which has been heavily nuclear...
...This widely held opinion is not without historical roots...
...The Washington Post noted that this was ' 'a departure from the traditional policy here of charging minor offenses in mass demonstration arrests...
...Brady explains that it is just "human nature" for workers to want more when things are going well...
...They were arrested in front of the White House last January during a demonstration against the state visit of Chinese Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping...
...But the economic needs in housing, transportation, education, and health — tellingly documented by Ruth Sivard — grow steadily more pressing...
...Instead, "more nations had arms and more used them, either internally or against foreign enemies...
...The notion that "modernizing" its nuclear weapons — as NATO euphemistically puts it — can enhance the security of Europe is as dangerous as it is absurd...
...We hope, of course, that the CIA Director was right the first time around: Nuclear weapons systems that don't work are by far the best kind...
...So far, the VA has been extremely conservative in handling veterans' Agent Orange disability claims...
...Because the state government continued to be more responsive to the textile and insurance industries than to the health needs of workers, the association finally went into Federal court...
...If this arms race promotes neither peace nor security, why does it continue unchecked...
...But now, like much of the current economic orthodoxy, these precedents bear less and less relation to reality...
...But in West Germany, as elsewhere, there is growing public concern about nuclear militarization...
...Butter, not guns Americans are often told that the endless armaments this country ships abroad are in response to the actions of other nations, especially the Soviet Union...
...The only plausible candidates for prime minister on the non-socialist side were the losers — the agrarian Center Party leader, Thorbjorn Falldin, who had laid the 1976 non-socialist coalition government low last fall when he shocked allies and observers alike by resigning because he was unable to carry out his campaign promise to stop the Swedish nuclear power program, and outgoing Prime Minister Ola Ullsten of the small Liberal Party, who had replaced Falldin and presided over something of an economic recovery...
...In the United States, more than one third of the $60 billion spent for arms last year went to ten corporations...
...Outside the prison where Bishop died, a small band of protesters carried candles and held up a blue banner that asked, "Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing is wrong...
...It should hire non-governmental scientists to look into Agent Orange's effects (nine of the thirteen VA Advisory Committee members work for some branch of the Government...
...The Russian response was to introduce a new medium-range nuclear missile specifically designed to hit western Europe from Soviet territory...
...Its case is not only a suit for $15 million in damages but also an attempt to educate the public about the disease, and about measures that can be taken to prevent it...
...scientist was invited to serve on the VA Advisory Committee and he, at least, had the grace to reject the task, saying it would be a conflict of interest because Dow was the principal maker of Agent Orange...
...The Air Force lately has been talking about running a "scientific study" on Agent Orange's effects, but the buildup of political pressure is such that it's likely this will be taken out of the Air Force's hands and given to the more objective National Academy of Sciences...
...The next round, for which a Soviet response seems inevitable if Brezhnev's surprise offer is turned down, is the deployment of the 572 upgraded U.S...
...Not even the Atomic Industrial Forum or other citadels of the American nuclear establishment have been able to match the unqualified enthusiasm of their Soviet counterparts...
...But on the next day, U.S...
...That is not a crime in America...
...Or is it the security of NATO, an institution that perpetuates itself by creating the very conditions it was intended to prevent...
...Government in the presence of a visitor...
...Falldin and Ullsten used tried and true Social Democratic measures to restrain unemployment...
...A few days later, President Carter announced that the MX would be deployed in the 1980s...
...The unanswered question At twenty-one minutes past midnight on Monday, October 22, Jesse Walter Bishop, a convicted murderer, was pronounced dead of cyanide poisoning...
...In today's economy, the pricing power of large conglomerates makes them increasingly immune to declines in consumer demand...
...Washington immediately dismissed Brezhnev's offer as an attempt to create disunity in the western alliance...
...On October 6, Soviet Premier Leonid I. Brezhnev announced the withdrawal of substantial troop and tank forces from central Europe and offered to reduce the number and yield of Soviet-based nuclear missiles targeted on western Europe if NATO would reciprocate...
...A suspicious trial There seems to be something fishy about the charges against Bob Avakian and sixteen other members of the Revolutionary Communist Party, who are soon to go on trial in Washington, D.C...
...The Government has a conflict, too...
...Supreme Court called his execution "state-assisted suicide...
...Unlike government expenditures in such areas as housing and mass transit, this spending does not undercut other sources of private corporate profit...
...Peace and security would be better served by public insistence that resources go where they are needed...
...We are unconvicted murderers...
...Edgar Ulsamer, a senior editor of Air Force Magazine, reports that when the NSC's Program Review Committee was conducting its final meeting on the MX early last August, opposition arose from an unexpected source — CIA Director Stansfield Turner...
...Is it really the security of Europe that rests on the deployment of another 572 missiles, each one of which could destroy a Soviet city or launch a nuclear strike that could plunge Europe and all the world over the abyss...
...Even the formation of NATO, some three decades ago, was a dubious proposition, resting as it did on the questionable assumption that the Soviet troops that occupied central Europe at the end of World War II somehow posed a threat to western Europe...
...But now, for the first time, a chink has developed in the Soviet nuclear armor...
...The Social Democrats count on forcing an election in the aftermath of the vote...
...Prodded by a relatively new veterans' group, Vietnam Veterans of America, Senator John Heinz, Pennsylvania Republican, and Representative David Bonior, Michigan Democrat, have introduced a "comprehensive" Vietnam veterans' bill which would change the ground rules for handling veterans' Agent Orange claims...
...About 500 were in place by 1976, when the United States also began the refining of its huge supply of 5,000 European-based "tactical" nuclear weapons into enhanced radiation "neutron bombs" designed to counter the supposed Soviet tank menace...
...The idea of another Government "investigation" of the effects of Agent Orange — whether by the Air Force, the National Academy of Science, or the VA — is ludicrous...
...The Ford Administration's "managed recession" allowed unemployment to reach a postwar high of 9 per cent in 1975, but even that harsh medicine brought inflation down only to 4.8 per cent...
...To make matters worse, the nuclear power issue — the key issue facing Sweden until the referendum on the topic scheduled for next March — split both blocs down the middle, pitting the anti-nuclear Communist and Center parties against the pro-nuclear Social Democrats, Moderates, and Liberals...
...arms exports were two-and-a-half times greater than Soviet exports...
...The Administration has secretly embarked on a $33 billion boondoggle — one that brings the world closer to doomsday...
...For Europeans, and for Americans as well, Holland's debate presents an opportunity for all to reflect on — and to do something about — the growing cost and peril of the European military build-up...
...Through October 3, it had received 676 claims and had approved only twenty — and of those, only two, both related to the skin disease chloracne, were blamed solely on Agent Orange, according to Peckarsky...
...With other European NATO partners — Holland, Italy, and Greece — either cool to the new weapons or wavering in their support of them, the outcome of the deployment issue may depend on what happens in Holland...
...But in the nuclear age it has presented a growing peril...
...The results made forming a government look like a political science exam question designed by a mad coalition theorist with a penchant for insoluble problems...
...But what is important in this episode is that once again a major "national security" decision — one that carries potentially catastrophic consequences and enormous costs — has been arrived at behind closed doors, with even the basic reservations of a top intelligence official hidden from public view...
...The referendum offers the party a way out, a way to settle the issue without making a decision...
...But that didn't happen, and late last spring it pulled together a formal "Advisory Committee on Health-Related Effects of Herbicides," which held its first open session in June, its second at the end of the summer...
...At the same time, military budgets have limited the ability of the wealthier states to provide economic assistance to poorer nations...
...Charles Peckarsky, the VA compensation director, says that if the bill became law, "I don't know where we'd draw the line...
...He and other Dutch socialists are under intense pressure to accede to the stationing of a new generation of nuclear weapons on Dutch territory...
...Almost 100 attributed their nervousness to Agent Orange, while fifty attributed various malignancies to it...
...Liberty Mutual, which insures Burlington, sampled cotton dust levels in the late 1960s and alerted the firm to the problem...
...It reveals in depressing detail the economic and social burden of military spending, which last year reached the staggering total of $425 billion...
...Brzezinski, Admiral Turner decided eventually to retract his original position in a secret communication [which] reflected a broad tolerant position on the MX weapon system...
...Jesse Walter Bishop went to his death calmly, almost cheerfully, after refusing all efforts to stave off his execution...
...In such circumstances, recession must be truly severe to make any dent in inflation...
...The Soviets responded by reassigning European targets to some of their long-range nuclear missiles previously trained on the United States...
...Between 1960 and 1977, developed states spent twenty times as much on military products as on economic assistance...
...In nuclear power, "just as with anything else," there are dangers, say Nikolai Dollezhai, also a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and Dr...
...Defense, limited war, victory, alliances, and the distinction between combatants and non-combatants also have lost most practical meaning...
...the Social Democrats, up two to 154...
...But the September election did not bring the high drama of a confident, unified non-socialist coalition facing a lean and resurgent Social Democratic Party in the ideological battle of the decade...
...About 2.4 million American soldiers were exposed to it...
...Schmidt announced that West Germany did not wish to be alone in introducing the new weapons into western Europe...
...De Vries is a leader of Holland's opposition Socialist Party, which traditionally has fought nuclear armaments programs, and a key figure in Dutch military policy-making circles...
...Congress is about to raise that by 9.9 per cent...
...Anatoly P. Aleksandrov in particular, and the Soviet Union in general, have long been in the forefront of nuclear boosterism...
...In the Nineteenth Century, economic booms and rising prices often gave way to recessions and price declines...
...And that means the Veterans Administration is starting to take the Vietnam war defoliant more seriously, too...
...The poison was designed, manufactured, and paid for by the Government...
...Nuclear power is one of the fastest growing industries in the Soviet Union...
...It said it would go ahead with plans for deployment of 572 intermediate range cruise missiles and Pershing missiles in western Europe — a plan that has long been in the making but that must still be ratified by NATO's foreign ministers at a meeting in Brussels on December 13 as well as by the parliaments of the nations in which the new weapons will be deployed...
...Massive increases in military spending by the developing nations have drained their economies and kept them underdeveloped...
...One of them — Ray Brady of CBS News — gives this rationale: While on the surface it is ironic that the Administration would intentionally pursue recessionary policies, a recession is needed so that workers won't demand high wages for more spending power to bid prices up...
...The bill would establish "a presumption" that Vietnam veterans with certain symptoms could draw compensation for service-connected disabilities...
...There was little surprise in that...
...From the last great bastion of nuclear power, it could be the first faint whisper of a Nyet...
...The courts have again opened the floodgates, and in the coming weeks and months scores — perhaps hundreds — of lives will be snuffed out by the states — by us...
...The bill would make any of the 2.4 million U.S...
...But events of recent weeks have placed an extraordinary premium on the outcome of the Dutch decision...
...The government that finally emerged in mid-October, led by Falldin with Liberal and Moderate participation, is a virtual replica of the government that Falldin led and brought down last October...
...His apparent hope was to head off deployment of new American-made nuclear missiles capable of hitting the Soviet Union from western Europe...
...Thirteen police officers and thirty-eight demonstrators were injured...
...By the time the indictments were handed down in June, nine demonstrators had been charged with assaulting "an unidentified member of the police force...
...The figure may seem low today, but it was higher than almost anything the country had experienced in the 1950s and 1960s, and the very next year it jumped back to 6.8 per cent...
...In controlling labor costs, recessions restore one of the conditions of corporate profitability — as long as unemployment doesn't become so high as to erode consumer demand...
...The citizen need look no further than the powerful corporate interests served by armaments...
...For West Germany the challenge was not so easily answered...
...The continuing collusion between the industry and the states makes it apparent that this is the way to go...
...Some facts are in dispute, but the Government's conduct of the case raises doubts about its motives...
...The first place they ought to look is Vietnam...
...Attorney Earl Silbert appeared at their bail hearing to announce that the charges were being raised to assault on a police officer — a felony...
...The Government has a heavy burden to prove that this case is not what it appears to be — a heavy-handed attempt to suppress unwelcome political views...
...But others should ask themselves how closely this economic orthodoxy fits the current reality...
...To meet the supposed threat of Soviet conventional forces — tanks and troops — that were hard to match, NATO many years ago began introducing nuclear weapons as a "deterrent...
...It instigated the poison's use...
...They are cheering the Fed's decision to raise the discount rate by a full 1 per cent and to increase reserve requirements — actions that will make commercial and private loans more expensive and harder to get...
...The election night spectacle was only the beginning...
...Fighting brown lung There is a lesson in the current class action suit against the Greenville, South Carolina, subsidiary of Burlington Industries, filed by the Carolina Brown Lung Association, a group of former textile workers who have organized to seek damages for past victims of the disease and to educate textile workers about the risks posed by high concentrations of cotton dust...
...Yet our strategic experts disquietingly continue to think in obsolete terms, and thus construct obsolescent policies concerning the nuclear weapons that have transformed the conditions of our existence...
...But "rapid and forceful action" by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the President's Assistant for National Security, saved the day: "Apparently because of the unified, broad opposition organized by Dr...
...There is no answer to that question...
...The Government has produced only the haziest evidence to support its unusually tough position...
...The decision by the Social Democrats after Three Mile Island to back a referendum on nuclear power to settle the fate of the Swedish nuclear program took the issue out of the internal Social Democratic debate...
...A Dow Chemical Co...
...Each American escalation of the nuclear ante in Europe has brought the inevitable Soviet response...
...The minority liberal government that followed Falldin found itself paralyzed by circumstances in the key area of energy and investment policy...
...There is little reason to accord this government a long life expectancy...
...American textile manufacturers are notoriously indifferent to the occupational health and safety needs of their workers...
...Hans J. Morgenthau has made the point tellingly in a recent article in The New Republic: "The military balance as a bean-counting exercise is just one concept among many, hallowed by tradition, that have been rendered obsolete by the nuclear revolution...
...But their admonition is a pointed one: "It can be assumed that with the current rapid growth in society's needs for energy, the present method of siting nuclear power plants will lead to the exhaustion of the ecological capacity of the region — and rather quickly in our opinion...
...As of September 30, VA compensation (not to be confused with pensions, given only for non-service-connected disabilities) was $808 a month for a 100 per cent disability for a veteran without dependents...
...CBLA has been encouraging employes to file workmen's compensation claims with the South Carolina Industrial Commission — but so far only one worker has received compensation...
...Admiral Turner's concern, of course, was not about escalation and overkill...
...No doubt most Social Democrats have noted with relief that it is their opponents who will preside over the referendum and who will reveal the depth of their disunity in the process...
...global military and economic power diminishes, these costs are less susceptible to our manipulation...
...The scientists also acknowledge that present methods of storing, transporting, and recycling nuclear fuel are not free of risks...
...Brady is not alone in that view...
...But from 1955 to 1977, U.S...
...COMMENT NATO's overdue crisis If Europe and the world are to be spared another round of deadly escalation of the nuclear arms race, it may well depend on the support that can be mustered in the coming weeks for a beleaguered few politicians of conscience, one of whom is Klaas G. De Vries, chairman of the Netherlands Parliament Defense Commission...
...A slower economy will dampen inflation by discouraging them from seeking more...
...The polls had predicted a close election, but no one anticipated quite the cliff-hanger the Swedes got: Preliminary results indicated a Social Democratic-Communist majority of one seat in the 349-seat Riksdag...
...Possibly it could present, at long last, the opportunity for a return to sanity...
...While a few powerful unions have won wage gains in excess of the President's "voluntary" standard, most workers have been lucky to get the approved 7 per cent...
...The Federal Reserve hopes that this course will bring prices down by slowing new business investment and consumer purchases — and the commentators are falling all over each other in their uncritical acceptance...
...But they were also victims of internal disunity on the same issue: Despite the facade of unity, the party is deeply divided over the issue of atomic power...
...And that's not all...
...But in the 1950s and early 1960s the United States supplied NATO with "tactical" nuclear weapons for battlefield use against conventional forces...
...The fate of six nuclear plants under construction — four of them will be finished by the referendum — hangs in the balance in March, and should the referendum be approved, the six plants that are currently in operation would be closed within the decade...
...In fact, he argued that "land-based ICBMs ought to be abandoned in favor of an expanded dyad whose sea- based element should be strengthened beyond the levels currently planned by the Administration...
...Dollezhai and Koryakin make it clear they are not yet ready to organize an anti-nuclear alliance in the Soviet Union...
...Ruth Sivard's new study, heavy ammunition for the peace activist, may be ordered from World Priorities, Inc., Box 1003, Leesburg, Virginia 22075, for $2.50...
...Brezhnev's proposal caused consternation in NATO, especially the United States and West Germany, which have strenuously advocated fortification of the alliance, already the most formidable military power on Earth, on grounds that it faced a growing Soviet threat...
...The Moderates, who — despite their intentionally misleading name — are on the extreme right of the Swedish political spectrum, had made their gains at the expense of their erstwhile allies, and the other non-socialists were not about to support Moderate leader Gosta Bohman as prime minister...
...De Vries told an interviewer a few weeks ago: "The Germans told our people when they visited Bonn that they would not go along with deployment if the Dutch can't go along, too...
...The growing inequality within the less developed nations and their increasing economic distance from Western industrialized powers only adds to world tension and reduces the security of everyone...
...They speak hopefully of establishing "nuclear parks" far from population centers — a solution once favored in the now anti-nuclear West...
...The warnings of the two scientists are mainly economic and environmental, arising from the fact that water needed to cool the projected new power plants will limit the agricultural development of western Russia...
...Some have been waiting three years for a ruling on their claims...
...That may lead them to take a harder look at an economic system which controls prices — ever more inadequately — only by laying off millions of workers, while pressing social needs remain unmet...
Vol. 43 • December 1979 • No. 12
